Screaming Ascent from Chaos

I write a letter to family and friends every Sunday. I started in 2011, and, yes, I have skipped a few Sundays over the years. Why? How? And how did I write a letter nearly every week for eight years? Well, this last week found me writing the three hundred and sixty-fifth “Sunday Letter”. Might as well make a thing of it.

I live in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. Like… way up in the middle of nowhere. It’s beautiful, it’s isolated, it’s quiet, but it is six miles to our nearest neighbor and a 30-minute drive to check our mailbox. As a result, keeping in touch with family can be a little challenging. Before the internet era, blogs, facebook, and status-updates, my mother started her dedicated letter-writing campaign to her mother-in-law and out-of-state relatives.

When we went to visit some of our far-flung family, I realized that I knew them less than most of the strangers who come to the family business. I wanted them to feel like they knew me, to feel comfortable reaching out. I could build bridges, even if I had no power over meeting the people on those bridges. All they needed to do was write back. Didn’t have to be long, just a line or two. It was a way to keep in contact with old friends, too.

The problem is that when I learned how to write correspondence as a cute lil’ homeschool grammarian, it was a proper three-paragraph thing starting with a ‘dear person’ and ending with a ‘love, troglodyte’. These were going to be LETTERS. Big, proper, Jane Austen-style letters. Even if most of them were sent via email instead of the post. There weren’t cop-outs, no re-posts, and I couldn’t cheat by just writing fiction.

How do you write three paragraphs about the mundane every-day, make it interesting, and do it weekly? How do you find something new every single week? Honestly, sometimes it means freaking out on Saturday and scrambling to find something interesting to do before Sunday morning rolls around. Look at what you do, at how you live, and give it the heart and humor that makes your own days enjoyable.

And what is the bottom line? What was the point to these paragraphs of rambling? Simply this… you should live a life worth writing about and tell the people that care all of your adventures.